Dictionary of Now #4 | Sharon Macdonald, Tony Bennett & Arjun Appadurai – THING

Museums stage objects as testimonies of specific narratives. How do
these museum things articulate the global order and supplant
alternative narratives? What meanings do they adopt in the context
of the dynamics of globalization and decolonization? At one of the
last events at the Dahlem location of the Ethnologische Museum,
Arjun Appadurai, Tony Bennett and Sharon Macdonald will explore the
“thing”: its subtexts, its tenacity and its political dimension.
Using selected objects from the collections, three experts probe
the narrative styles of “things.” Arjun Appadurai, Professor of
Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, examines
the migration of things and asks how they become legible as bearers
of aesthetic knowledge. Tony Bennett, Research Professor in Social
and Cultural Theory at Western Sydney University, presents the
evolution of seeing in museums and the fixation on the viewer’s
perspective. The cultural anthropologist Sharon Macdonald,
Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the Institute for European
Ethnology at Humboldt-Universität, combines the two theoretical
approaches with the latest developments in Berlin’s museum
landscape. How do things become signifiers in the museum space? How
do societies handle problematic aspects of cultural heritage? What
processes of learning and unlearning are necessary in order to
decipher hegemonic narratives and geopolitics?